The Multiple Voices of Feminist Life History Research
P. Munro, M.E. Jacobs, & N. Adams
The Multiple Voices of Feminist Life History Research
Petra Munro
Mary-Ellen Jacobs
Natalie Adams
Louisiana State University
Introductory Voices:
To help describe our work as feminist life history researchers, we borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson who tersely advised her readers to: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies" (1961, p. 248). For us, "telling it slant" suggests the contradictions we find in women's life history narratives. We resist questing for a single unitary Truth but, instead, seek to uncover the multiple truths and multiple stories contained within a single life. Thus, our project has been to attend carefully to the life history narratives of three career teachers so that we might learn how these women author themselves through story. For, as Chanfrault-Duchet (1991) reminds us, "facts and events take their meaning from the narrative structure in which they are embedded" (p. 79). A second aspect of our project has been to consider how the multiple, conflicting truths of women's lived experience speaks to us as interpretive researchers, that is, how "telling it slant" necessarily precludes the traditional positivistic preoccupation with "getting the story right."
Over the past several months, we have gathered numerous times to share our stories of Anna, Cleo and Aunt Bec -- women who have become central to making sense of our own lives. As we struggle within a patriarchal society to enact our educational visions as women teachers, the life histories of these three women act as potential guides in the complex terrain we negotiate. Although we may have initially romanticized their stories, often a necessary step in life history research, it is the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities of their narratives to which we return in our many conversations. Born in the first quarter of this century, Anna, Cleo, and Aunt Bec share a lifelong commitment to education. Why, we wonder, despite their lengthy careers in teaching, is a central theme in each of their narratives a certain ambivalence toward teaching? Anna, describes herself as a "terrible elementary teacher" and continually attributes her career accomplishments to others. Similarly, Cleo claims she "could have lived another life and been just as happy." In her personal journals, Aunt Bec writes little about her teaching but longs to be a poet and writer.
Particularly confounding is the paradox between the remarkable achievements of each of these women and the lack of agency displayed in their narratives. Several strategies appear repeatedly: deferring accomplishments to others, minimizing the success of their careers, and decentering their own stories. This silencing of self seems to conform to the erasure plot expected of women. Again, we wonder how to make sense of these multiple layers of representation. Like Katherine Borland (1991), we are curious about how the life historians would themselves interpret their stories. Would they acknowledge the contradictions and tensions we find in their lives? How might our interpretations reflect and reveal the gendered norms in which we live?
In recognizing that our stories will always be intersubjective and that we will never "get it right," we have focused more recently on how the three women constructed their stories. Discussing their narratives, we sensed a similarity in the dominant metaphors used in the telling of their stories. Subtle, yet pervasive, Anna's image of "roaming through a life space" and Cleo's description of herself as a "drifter" provided markers for how they traversed the complexities of their lives. Aunt Bec's self-representation was not captured in a single phrase or word but manifested itself through conflicting images of Southern womanhood in literary texts read repeatedly to Natalie as a young girl. Although we sought initially to tell a "truth" about these women, the metaphors they live by reveal complex truths which, as the Personal Narratives Group (1991) suggests, don't reveal the past "as it was" but instead reveal the truths of our experiences. It is to these experiences which we now turn.
Anna's Story: Roaming Through A Life Space:
Now 88 years old, Anna, a still vigorous, snowy-haired emeritus professor of education at a major Eastern university, chose to call a recently published autobiographical reminiscence "Roaming Through a Life-Space" -- a haunting title which seems to hint at how Anna tells her story slant. She credits Kurt Lewin with the phrase "life space," meaning the web of relationships which forms the fabric of one's world. Thus, persons -- ranging from significant others to casual acquaintances -- are connected over time and distance in continually shifting configurations within the fluid boundaries of one's lifeworld. For Anna, who acknowledges that the single recurring theme in her life is that "people are important," connection to persons seems ultimately to be the core of her life and her life history narrative.
Although the concept of a "life space" resonates with Anna's autobiographical reflections, her selection of the word "roaming" to describe how she navigates her life space suggests the inconsistencies inherent in her apparently seamless re-telling. According to Webster's, "to roam" can mean either "to go from place to place without a specific direction" or "to travel purposefully throughout a wide area unhindered." Though "roaming" is probably most often associated with aimlessness, the purposefulness explicit in the second definition suggests a surprising slantedness to Anna's story.
Ostensibly the good daughter, Anna crafts a life story which carefully cloaks her own agency. She invariably tells her story through others (e.g., "Bill came and interviewed me for this job...and convinced me that I had to go") or explains away substantial achievements as good fortune (e.g, "I just kind of got regular promotions. Automatically every three years, I got moved up and never applied for it or anything"). Yet, hairline cracks appear in the narrative surface and reveal Anna's resolute ambition and enormous energy -- unwomanly traits in a patriarchal culture. For example, immediately after completing normal school in 1924, Anna returned to her state university for a Bachelor's degree followed quickly by a Master's. She then attended summer school sessions at Ohio State and the University of Wisconsin prior to entering a doctoral program so that she could complete her degree in only two years. As we talk, I notice that she relates all of this information in a distinctly off-hand way then digresses rapidly to other topics.
Intrigued by the contradictions which simmer just beneath the surface of Anna's narrative, I listen even more intently. Anna has "always wanted to be a teacher" though her interest in the profession is never linked to a sentimental love of children. Anna chose to teach high school -- a daring choice for a woman in the 1920's when secondary education was still considered the province of males. A decade later, she taught at the elementary level in preparation for becoming a principal. She repeatedly characterizes herself as a "terrible" elementary teacher -- "I wasn't all that good at it."
Ironically, even as Anna actively resists gender stereotyping as the "mother-teacher," she seems the model of female deference by consistently attributing her impressive professional achievements to forces outside of herself, most notably a succession of male mentors: "I think it was Bill who got me a chance to come to Middletown to teach in a junior high school where he was principal" or "A man who was going to be the new superintendent of schools invited me to come and be the elementary supervisor." Echoes of the dutiful daughter are unmistakable in each of these passages as Anna, in keeping with patriarchal conventions, repeatedly repudiates her own agency as a female. Instead, a host of male mentors paves Anna's way by appearing at critical crossroads in her professional career to obtain for her everything from her first teaching position to admission into a prestigious doctoral program to tenure as a full professor at a leading university. Anna's narrative transforms her life into a storybook tale of a devoted daughter whose deference and hard work inevitably win male approval and its attendant rewards.
Anna capitulates -- or so it seems -- to the primacy of patriarchy which reduces female "roaming" to an aimless, and ultimately futile, enterprise without a male guiding the way. Yet, realizing that all of our stories are necessarily partial and incomplete, I resist the temptation to read Anna's narrative as a finished text. Instead, like Adrienne Rich, I recognize that "the words are purposes, the words are maps" (1973, p. 23) which can illuminate still unimagined landscapes of meaning. Perhaps also like Rich, I am equally conscious of odd gaps and occasional hesitations between words -- pauses which can point toward deeper understandings.
For me, "roaming" -- a word with deeply buried contradictions -- helps make tangible the gendered conflicts which ripple through Anna's narrative. For example, shortly after our interview began, Anna apologetically admitted: "I don't like to talk about myself." Thus, her reminiscences intentionally roamed to less personal rememberings -- a deliberate marginalization of self which -- paradoxically -- resists stereotypical notions of female passivity. I couldn't help but wonder if Anna's persistent denial of agency might, in fact, be an active rather than an imposed choice -- a conscious decision to adhere to the patriarchal script and attenuate the vitality of her own agency. The double-voiced meaning of "roaming" in Anna's narrative opens unexpected interpretive vistas and reminds us, as researchers, to cherish the obliqueness of the telling, the multiple contradictions and puzzles layered provocatively behind the words.
Cleo: The Drifter:
At our first meeting Cleo, one of the life historians with whom I worked for over six months, announced to me, "I could have lived another life and been just as happy." I was taken aback that someone who had committed over 30 years of her life to teaching, administration, and social studies curriculum reform could so easily have "lived another life." The tension between what I perceived to be her "lived" life and the story she told seemed to present me, the interpreter, with an impossible task: Which was her life? Despite my desire to "get the story right" and understand how Cleo resolved what I perceived as a contradiction in her life, her repeated characterization of herself as a "drifter" added yet another layer of complexity to her story.
Initially, her self representation as a "drifter" suggested to me a sense of aimlessness and a lack of agency. This metaphor did not capture the "drive" I saw as central in Cleo's life and her success as a teacher, administrator and as an innovator of curriculum change. Nor did this metaphor conform to the notions of agency which I had hoped to uncover in my life history work with women teachers. Why, I wondered, did Cleo choose to tell her story slant? How did this self-representation as a drifter reflect the multiple dimensions of her life?
Rather than dismiss her opening comment, I began to question why she might tell this particular story. At first, I interpreted her statement as a sign of her own investment in the devaluation of teaching because it was "women's work." The discourse of teaching as "women's true profession" situates women in an "impossible fiction" (Walkerdine, 1991) in which women's proclivity toward nurturing simultaneously functions to valorize and sabotage teachers' work. Consequently, by constructing the story that she could have lived another life, Cleo actually resists essentializing representations of women teachers by constructing a self-representation in which she is an active agent who "could have lived another life." Thus, her story allows her to reconcile her decision to become a teacher, a traditionally female profession, with her own understanding of herself as rebel and intellectual.
In retrospect, her statement also seems consistent with her own conception of herself as someone who did not "follow the norms" and rebelled against them "so that I could be myself." Born and raised in the South in the 1920's, Cleo characterized her childhood as one in which she learned that "it was clear that you just did certain things, like wearing white gloves and a hat, even if it was just to the corner store." As a young woman, she rebelled against the "marriage plot" (Aisenberg & Harrison, 1988) and sought to "live her own life" by taking flight from societal and familial norms through travel and education. In the early 1940's, she traveled to Panama and eventually to the Pacific Northwest where she pursued her intellectual interests in economics and history (in which she was always "one of the boys") at the University of Washington. Despite the agency of this tale, her story of rebellion, adventure and flight reproduced a masculinist narrative of separation and autonomy, which as I understood it, threatened to erase her very subjectivity.
Despite her story of rebellion, Cleo did become a teacher and claimed that she
eventually went into teaching "because all her friends were doing it." In effect, she was the drifter, someone being carried along by others, propelled by forces over which she had no control. Thus, she neatly absolves herself of any agency in becoming a teacher by deferring her decision to others. Although ostensibly she complies with the master narrative of teaching as "women's true profession," Cleo's self-representation as a "drifter" both justifies her decision to enter teaching and resolves her conflicting feelings of entering the teaching profession. For Cleo, who "wanted to live her own life," the metaphor of the "drifter" functioned to enable her to step outside traditional female roles as well as be swept up by them.
The tension between Cleo's understanding of herself as a drifter and my desire to uncover acts of agency was nowhere more apparent than in Cleo's stories of becoming an administrator. Initially, I interpreted her move into administration as a form of agency on two levels. First, moving into administration contested dominant understandings of women teachers as having a "low work commitment." Secondly, I saw Cleo's move into administration as taking on a position of power from which she could enact change. In light of her successful career and what I perceived as an orderly progression from teacher to chairperson to administrator, I was surprised at the manner in which Cleo described her career as "not planned." Cleo recalled about her move into administration: "I just sort of fell into it...I wasn't trying to reach the top in either teaching or administration; I had no desire to be the top Joe." Cleo made it clear regarding her position as a Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator, "I didn't apply for it; I was asked." I struggled to understand why Cleo "resisted" conceptualizing herself as an active agent. Had she internalized patriarchal norms so well that she was merely acting out her role as a dutiful and appropriately meek daughter?
Cleo's story intrigued me because of what I perceived as the apparent contradiction between her role as a senior administrator in a very large school district and her persistent claims that "she never wanted to be the top Joe." Cleo reflected on her career: "It wasn't conscious. I didn't plan ahead. I was a drifter." Again, her description of herself as a drifter contrasted strongly with my own perceptions of Cleo as actively pursuing a career despite societal norms which Cleo described as "I think you were expected to get married and have a family." I wondered why, despite her success, she persisted throughout our interviews to attribute her successes to others or to chance. Did her image of herself as a "drifter" allow her to construct a self which fit more readily with societal expectations of women as powerless and without authoritative roles? Did deferring her successes to others signal her conflicted feeling about leaving the classroom and betraying her "natural duty" as a woman? Or was it, as Carolyn Heilbrun (1988) has pointed out, that women have difficulty taking credit for their accomplishments because they see these as grounded in relation to others not as individual, autonomous accomplishments?
Again, Cleo's deferral to others conflicted with my search for ways in which women have been active agents despite gendered norms and expectations. I struggled to understand what I saw as a contradiction. In reading other works on women's lives (Aisenberg & Harrison, 1988; Hancock, 1989), I was surprised to find that, in their analysis of the case studies of women, the word "drifter" also appeared in accounts of women's descriptions of their lives. The term was used not in the negative sense of aimless or unmotivated but as a way to describe stepping outside the norms as a means of creating their own concepts of themselves and of their work which reflected their understandings.
Originally, I did not interpret Cleo's story of the "drifter" as a form of resistance. Again, my understandings of resistance and change, which assumed that change results from deliberate and active resistance to the structures perpetuating oppression, seemed to get in the way. Yet, paradoxically, Cleo's lack of intentionality, through the naming of herself as a drifter, becomes transformed into an expression of agency. By seeing herself outside societal norms, she deflects and decenters these and does not have to be defined by them. In this sense, the drifter can write her own script. In "analyzing the way any binary opposition operates, reversing and displacing its hierarchical construction, rather than accepting it as real or self-evident or in the nature of things" (Scott, 1989, p. 92), the drifter embodied for me the process of deconstructing the scripts written for women.
Aunt Bec's Story:
Like Cleo and Anna, Aunt Bec was a teacher for over 40 years and unquestionably had a tremendous influence on hundreds of students. However, today I have chosen to concentrate on my aunt's understanding of herself as a Southern woman and the ways in which she taught me what it meant to be a woman in the South. As a young girl growing up in rural northeast Louisiana in the 1970's, I remember well the lessons I was taught about femininity from my aunt who lived next door to me all of my life. Why did Aunt Bec idealize what I considered to be traditional Southern norms of femininity while rejecting these norms in her personal life? Why did she not ascribe to those traits she so admired? The Southern woman my aunt idealized was the disciplined, compassionate, yet strong-willed woman who was the manager of the house as well as the spiritual foundation of the family. The Southern woman my aunt so idolized and idealized never said an unkind or harsh word about anyone, and she always exhibited self-control and a disciplined tongue. The Southern woman my aunt held in such high esteem publicly deferred to men on all matters of importance while privately holding the real power in the house.
However, memories of Aunt Bec do not conjure up images of the Southern lady that she so admired. She was a large woman with big hands and feet. More often than not, she was either perched on the back of her favorite mare May or training her Arabian colt Salidan always with her collie in close pursuit. She drank beer with her meals ("It's good for your digestion"); she cursed when she needed to; and she told dirty jokes. She detested the feminine practices of small talk and gossip; she abhorred going to baby showers and weddings; she refused to sit in church one minute past noon. She conversed much more easily with men. Politicians, intellectuals, and outdoorsmen were her comrades.
During my early teens, Aunt Bec sat me down on several occasions and read to me two excerpts from the long narrative poem John Brown's Body. Both poems are portraitures of Southern women during the Civil War. My aunt always read the poems in the same order, beginning with a poem about Mary Lou Wingate, the quintessential Southern genteel woman who knows all too well the "whole duty of womankind":
Once you were married and settled down
With a suitable gentleman of your own.
And when this happened, and you had bred
The requisite children, living and dead,
To pity the fool and comfort the weak
And always let the gentlemen speak
To succor your love from deep-struck roots
When gentlemen went to bed in their boots,
And manage a gentlemen's whole plantation
In the manner befitting your female station.
This was the creed that her mother taught her
And the creed that she taught to every daughter. (Benet, 1927, p. 140)
Unquestionably, my aunt vicariously bought into the myth of the Southern genteel woman as exemplified by her admiration of the Southern lady of the poem. Why then did she not emulate her in her own life? She was fiery; she did not bite her tongue; she certainly criticized when she felt like it. She never showed subservience to anyone, male or female! And she never married....a source of continuous embarrassment to me as a young girl entrenched in the belief that a woman was incomplete without a man.
Immediately after reading the first poem to me, Aunt Bec would follow with a poem about a young Southern woman who resists the very "creed" described in the first poem. The woman in the poem Lucy Weatherby realizes that to marry inevitably means to lose one's self; marriage can indeed signify the death of one's spirit. It is a price that Lucy is not willing to pay:
Her eyes were veiled. She swayed in front of the mirror.
"Honey, I love you," she whispered, "I love you, honey.
Nobody loves you like I do, do they, sugar?
Nobody knows but Lucy how sweet you are.
You mustn't get married, honey. You mustn't leave me.
We'll be pretty and sweet to all of them, won't we, honey?
We'll always have beaus to dance with and tunes to dance to,
But you mustn't leave me, honey. I couldn't bear it.
You mustn't ever leave me for any man. (Benet, 1927, pp. 243-244)
I still remember vividly the questions, the contradictions, the conflicts I experienced as my aunt read these two poems to me in almost the same breath. Was the Lucy poem her explanation to me about the way she had chosen to live her life? Unmarried -- independent -- authoritative -- aggressive. Although she may have idealized Mary Lou Wingate, it was Lucy that her life seemed to parallel.
Since my aunt is now dead, I can only give my own meanings to why she chose to read these two poems to me over and over again. Perhaps she was validating my right to choose whatever life I wanted to live. Perhaps, by reading the two poems back to back, she was offering me a choice -- I could be either the stoic, genteel married woman of the first poem or the independent, spirited unmarried woman of the second poem. However, as I learn more and more about my aunt's life, especially about her secret life as a writer and poet, I think she was actually challenging the very dichotomy of good woman/bad woman that is implicitly suggested in these two poems. Certainly Mary Lou Wingate is portrayed as the good woman "the South's incarnate pride" and Lucy as the bad woman.
However, my aunt's life seems to reject these traditional understandings of women as one dimensional characters who are defined by their relationships to men and to their adherence to cultural expectations. In reality, our lives as Southern woman are not so simply reduced to binary oppositions of "either/or's" and "neither/nor's". As my aunt's life illuminates, our lives are more often than not filled with "both/and's"; thus, our lives are much more complex and our identities much more non-unitary. In the end, perhaps what my aunt gave me some fifteen years ago as she read these poems to me was an affirmation of a blurred identity that somehow merges both the Mary Lou Wingate's and the Lucy Weatherby's.
Concluding Voices:
As we planned our presentation, we spent considerable time debating how to bring closure on the stories we'd spun. Because a tidy ending denies the partiality, incompleteness, and occasional incoherences which are the fabric of human existence, we choose to conclude more ambiguously by opening up -- rather than closing down -- the conversation, by inviting you to reflect with us on the multiple meanings of Anna's, Cleo's and Aunt Bec's stories. What might the many contradictions embedded in their narratives mean to women like ourselves struggling to author our own lives as teachers and as researchers? How might "telling it slant" more deeply attune us to the richness and remarkable complexities of day-to-day lived experience?
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